“I don’t know what I expected,” said Lucie, looking perplexed, “but it wasn’t this. Where’s the throne of skulls? The decapitated Lilith statues? The tapestries with Belial’s face on them?”
“This place feels utterly dead.” Cordelia felt sick to her stomach. “Lilith and Filomena both said Belial had taken it over, that he was using it, but what if Lilith was lying? Or if they were just—wrong?”
“We won’t know until we search,” Lucie said, with grim determination.
They headed up the curving stairs—it was two sets of spiral staircases, weaving in and out of each other, never touching—until they reached the second floor. Here there was a long stone corridor; they followed it carefully, weapons at the ready, but it was just as empty as the entryway. At the corridor’s end were a pair of metal doors. Cordelia looked at Lucie, who shrugged and pushed one of them open.
Inside was another large room, semicircular in shape, with a floor of marble, badly cracked. There was a kind of bare stone platform rising against one of the walls; behind it were two huge windows. One gazed out over the bleak plains of Edom. The second was a Portal.
The surface of it swirled and danced with color, like oil on the surface of water. Through that movement, Cordelia could see what was unmistakably London. A London whose skies were gray and black, the clouds overhead riven with heat lightning. In the foreground, a bridge over a dark river; beyond it, a Gothic structure rising against the sky, a familiar clock tower—
“It’s Westminster Bridge,” said Lucie, in surprise. “And the Houses of Parliament.”
Cordelia blinked. “Why would Belial want to go there?”
“I don’t know, but—look at this.” Cordelia glanced over and saw Lucie on her tiptoes, examining a heavy iron lever that emerged from the wall just to the left of the doors. Thick chains rose from it, disappearing into the ceiling.
“Don’t—” Cordelia started, but it was already too late; Lucie had pulled the lever down. The chain began to move; they could hear it grinding in the walls and ceilings.
Abruptly, a circular piece of the floor sank out of sight, forming what looked like a well. Rushing to the edge of it, Cordelia saw stairs leading down, and at the bottom of the stairs—light.
She started down the steps. The walls on either side were polished stone, engraved with more designs and words, but this time Cordelia could read them: they were not in a demonic language, but in Aramaic. And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’?”
“This must have been written here by the Shadowhunters,” said Lucie, following carefully after Cordelia. “I suppose because the stairs lead to—”
“A garden,” Cordelia said, for she had reached the foot of the steps, where a blank stone wall stood before them—but with another iron lever emerging from the wall at one side. She looked at Lucie, who shrugged. Cordelia pulled, and again the grinding of stone upon stone, and a portion of the wall rolled away, revealing a doorway. She ducked through it and found herself outside the fortress, in a walled garden—or what had once been a garden. It was withered and blackened now, studded with the stumps of dead trees, the dry, cracked ground covered in broken bits of black rock.
Standing in the middle of the ruined garden, looking filthy and half-starved but very definitely alive, was Matthew.
While Grace and Jesse remained in the library, sending fire-messages to every Institute on a very long list, Thomas had volunteered to join Alastair on the roof to keep watch. The roof gave them the best view over the widest area: they could see if Watchers were approaching or even—and Thomas knew this was a desperate hope—if the fire-messages had reached their target, and reinforcements of Shadowhunters might be arriving in London.
It was hard to have hope that anything would change. It was the earliest hours of the morning, and under normal circumstances, the sky would have started to lighten by now. But it looked exactly as it had for the past days—the sky a boiling black cauldron, the air full of the scent of ash and burning, the water of the Thames a lightless green-black. There weren’t even any Watchers to spot, for the moment.
Thomas leaned on his elbows next to Alastair, who wore an unreadable expression.
“It’s so odd to see the Thames without any boats,” Thomas said. “And no sounds of voices, no trains… it’s like the city is sleeping. Behind a hedge of thorns, like in a fairy tale.”
Alastair looked over at him. His eyes were dark and held a tenderness that was new. When Thomas thought of the night before, in the infirmary with Alastair, he blushed hard enough to feel it. He quickly went back to staring at London.
“I actually feel a bit hopeful,” said Alastair. “Is that mad?”
“Not necessarily,” said Thomas. “It could just be light-headedness, since we’re running out of food.”
Normally Alastair would have smiled at that, but his expression stayed serious, inward. “When I decided to stay in London,” he said, “it was partly because it seemed the right thing to do, not to take Belial’s offer. And partly because of Cordelia. But it was also that I didn’t want…”
“What?” said Thomas.
“To leave you,” Alastair said. Now Thomas did look at him. Alastair was leaning against the iron railing. Despite the cold, the top button of his shirt was undone. Thomas could see the wings of his collarbone, the hollow of his throat where Thomas had kissed him. Alastair’s hair, usually neat, was windblown, his cheeks flushed. Thomas wanted to touch him so badly, he shoved his hands into his pockets.
“What you said to me in the library, when we were there with Christopher,” Thomas said. “It sounded a bit like poetry. What did it mean?”
Alastair’s eyes flicked toward the horizon. “‘Ey pesar, nik ze hadd mibebari kar-e jamal. Ba conin hosn ze to sabr konam?’ It is poetry. Or at least, a song. A Persian ghazal. Boy, your beauty is beyond all description. How can I wait, when you are so beautiful?” His mouth quirked up at the corner. “I always knew the words. I can’t remember when it fully struck me what they meant. It is men who sing ghazals, you know; it occurred to me only then that there were others who felt as I did. Men who wrote freely about how beautiful other men were, and that they loved them.”
Thomas tightened his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think anyone has ever thought I was beautiful, except for you.”
“That’s not true,” Alastair said decidedly. “You don’t see how people look at you. I do. It used to make me grind my teeth—I was so jealous—I thought surely you’d choose anyone in the world who wasn’t me.” He reached up, cupped a hand around the back of Thomas’s neck. He was biting at his lower lip, which made Thomas’s skin burn. He knew what it was like to kiss Alastair now. It wasn’t just a flight of imagination; it was real, and he wanted it again more than he would have thought possible. “If last night was just the once, tell me,” Alastair said in a low voice. “I’d rather know.”
Thomas yanked his hands out of his pockets. Taking hold of the lapels of Alastair’s coat, he pulled the other boy toward him. “You,” he said, brushing his lips against Alastair’s, “are so aggravating.”